Tag Archives: ntldr is missing

She also tried connecting it to another, older, PC, but it would only show up as a 10Mb drive (its actually a 160Gb maxtor).

She also tried the acer recovery CD, but it wanted to reformat the whole drive before installing windows… so she said no to that.

I figure if its just a ntldr corruption, it should be easy to get everything back to normal.

I need to take the PC back to the office, and connecting the drive to a different PC does indeed show only a 10Mb FAT partition.

At least the drive doesn’t seem to be about to fail.

I start the recovery process, and soon find lots of ntfs data on the drive.

I call the customer, and given the importance of the data, she says to go ahead with the data recovery.

During the recovery process, I only get 1 read error, and I am able to recover most of the data, but most of the top-level folder names seem to be lost (except for windows, informed, and two others). I suspect the MFT has been lost.

Anyway, she quickly got her data back (on 2 dvds), but most of the data is in folders with names like [001D56].

Its not nice, but its the best that can be done without spending days reconstructing the data.

I suspect that plugging the drive into another (older) computer actually made the drive worse (as I’ve actually done something similar myself)…

Never plug a “potentially” corrupt drive into an older PC… it can make things worse.

So I think: “aha! i know what this is… it shouldn’t be too hard to fix)…

I boot ubcd4win, and overwrite the existing ntldr and ntdetect.com … but the system still generates the same error.

Hmmm, this system has an internal C: drive and a “caddy” drive… So I try pulling out the caddy, then start the PC. This time the PC boots like there was never anything wrong.

I shutdown, insert the caddy, and then the PC gives the familiar ntldr problem.

I remember reading that this kind of problem can be caused by a faulty ATA cable (and I previously replaced a faulty ribbon cable a few months ago)… but it doesn’t seem to make sense.

During yet another reboot, I catch a glimpse of the bios information page… and it looked like there was no drive detected as ide0 master. Now that isn’t right!

I restart, jump into the bios, and see that the main HDD has actually been detected, but as ide1 master … while the caddy drive is detected as ide0 master (hence the ntldr error. The caddy drive has no OS).

Has someone been inside the PC and swapped cables? Customer assures me no-one else has opened the pc since I last looked at it.

Anyway, I disconnect power to the PC, open up the PC, notice the IDE cables look correct… OK, I’ll swap them anyway.

I then restart the PC, and I get the ntldr error again!

bios says the main HDD is plugged into ide1.

OK then, I swap the cables back to how they were originally, and now the bios detects the main HDD correctly.

and now everything boots correctly, without any problems in sight.

What I think happened is: Bios or MOBO electronics got confused… maybe due to caddy system, and/or a power glitch… and the PC reversed the meaning of ide0 and ide1… removing the caddy fixed problem temporarily.

removing power to the mobo while I swapped the ide cables caused everything to go back to “normal”.

I advised the customer to remove the power cord (for about 1 minute) if this ever happens again.